Police, IFPI make bacon of OiNK BitTorrent tracker

A two-year investigation of invite-only BitTorrent site OiNK results in its …

The invite-only music site OiNK will grunt and snuffle no more after police seized the site's servers and arrested a 24-year-old UK man. The IFPI is now crowing over the bust and the closure of the "primary source worldwide for illegal prerelease music."

IFPI and BPI, the UK music trade group, spent two years investigating the private BitTorrent tracker and worked with police in both the UK and the Netherlands to shut the site down. The servers, based in Amsterdam, were grabbed last week, but the alleged administrator of the site was just picked up near Middlesborough in the UK.

OiNK specialized in leaking albums; IFPI estimates that the site had a membership of 180,000 "hard-core file sharers" who had to prove their worthiness to join the site by providing leaked demos or rough mixes of hot upcoming releases.

The site didn't charge a membership fee, but it did accept donations. The Cleveland police, which conducted the UK raid, claim that "hundreds of thousands of pounds" were being made by the operators and then stashed in various bank accounts.

OiNK's address, oddly enough, is oink.cd. The site was previously experiencing DNS problems and eventually decided that the solution was to use an address belonging to the Congo. Now the domain throws up a gray screen with the IFPI and BPI logos. Above those is a warning message about how the site has been closed as the result of a criminal investigation into "suspected illegal music distribution." Will other invite-only tracker sites and darknets take the hint?

Whac-A-Mole

The evolution of such sites follows a predictable pattern. First, the development of new technology like BitTorrent means that people initially believe they can do just about anything they want with the new tools and no one will come after them. Once the tools enter public (and police) consciousness, big sites like OiNK generally move underground and out of easy view, or become targets for rights-holders and law enforcement.

Bringing underground sites down isn't easy, as the two-year IFPI investigation demonstrates, but it can be done. Such attention is generally directed only at sites that have grown exceptionally large or important, and the result is often that the operators get busted but the users simply join smaller and less visible communities.

So is this just a game of Whac-A-Mole? BPI insists that is not. CEO Geoff Taylor said in a statement, "BitTorrent has fast become the most popular file-sharing client, and while the technology is now commonplace, closed criminal networks such as OiNK take time to develop; make no mistake, this operation will cause major disruptions this illegal activity."

The hope is clearly that it will also send a message to smaller darknets who might have believed that they could operate without consequences. The legal pressure brought to bear by music, movie, and television content owners around the world has made operating such sites more risky. Anecdotally, we have some evidence that some of these smaller sites are getting the message. For example, Something Awful used to host forums filled with links to torrent files, but worries about potential legal liability led site operators to abandon the project at the beginning of 2005. Many users then migrated to private spinoff trackers like Whilst, which offered a similar set of torrents to a closed community. In the past few months, Whilst, too, has gotten out of the torrent business, presumably out of concern for liability, and now hosts only a handful of discussion forums.

OiNK may be sizzling in Big Content's frying pan, but there are still countless other private trackers and darknets up and running. The arrest of OiNK's admin shows that there is a definite risk in running these sites, but it's a sure bet that the illicit music previously available on the tracker will eventually find new homes on the Internet—especially with sites such as The Pirate Bay openly flouting the IFPI and other industry groups.